Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics & the Life of a Water Poet

October 09, 2011

I'll start by mentioning my recent--was it a week-and-a-half ago already?--reading for the UAF Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series. The craft talk (Like an Off-Tempo Waltz: Writers and Editors) went well. Dinner at one of the local Thai restaurants was tasty. And the reading was well-attended enough that they had to add extra rows for the audience. It helped immensely that the other guy reading is the new Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. And it doesn't hurt that darkness comes early.

The reading reminded me of one of the core tensions for any place-based ecopoet: how do you start writing again after a move?

I read from my "Boomtown" manuscript, and several audience members talked to me afterward about their love of the midwest and Great Plains, and the difficulty they experienced expressing that affection--that identity--with people outside the region. Their reactions (and prepping for the reading) have helped me return to the manuscript with renewed energy. But with two sobering changes. First, I've had the feeling--and then the actual wording--that a book so closely focused on a town that is in flyover country won't garner any publisher interest. So I've had to scrub out some of the tight focus and reference. I'm deeply ambivalent about this shift. Second, I've moved to a new place.

That move really drives a deep engagement with a topic I've wrestled with, written about, and knew I had to face again: punctuated migration. I'm not one of the dirt elite (those lucky few who managed to live on the same land as their ancestors--and not as sharecroppers, freedmen (and women), or other marginalized population), and I live in the most mobile era of human existence, so I'm pretty much guaranteed not to spend my life in one place. So, as I've already mentioned: how to start writing again in this place?

The natural drama, aesthetic appeal, charismatic megafauna, ragged edge of civilization components don't help. It seems too easy, almost, like you could get lazy writing in a place like this with its fjords, granite ranges, polar bears, dog sleds, profound winters, northern lights... Zounds! What's not to love? And yet, that kind of surface can be blinding--and I'm of course most interested in the metaphorical way it can be blinding. Having grown up in an area of great physical beauty, and a concomitant tourist industry, I'm suspicious of surfaces.

The dilemma then is that I very much want to get writing, but I don't trust my first reading, my first engagement (foxes and beavers on the way to work, black bears on the trail along the backyards, moose closing off lanes of traffic!). The great thing about my job is that a lot of research comes to me, so I'm learning a lot about the place quickly. As you might expect from a place so large, though, the diversity of climate and peoples is--well, it's as stark in its diversity as any chunk of land that you can separate into distinct regions. Barrow and Ketchikan both have water right next to the town, but they might as well be on different worlds (compare their weather forecasts, for starters).

And I'm on a different planet, entirely, here in the interior. So I wait. I listen. I try to get people to talk to me (not hard to do in my job). I start to think about travel, space, light, the choices any of us might make to come up here.